ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the reasons for, and the specific manner of, women's contribution to late Victorian and Edwardian reform politics. In the aims of Victorian feminism, long-term social change meshed with highly focused, single-issue reforms. The dynamics of political and legal change that unfolded between the first meetings, in 1865, of the Kensington Committee, formed to campaign for the election to Parliament of John Stuart Mill, who championed women's suffrage, and the achievement of the franchise on fully equal terms with men in 1928 provides only one, albeit an important one, of the long-term issues of reform to which feminists were committed. The shift in the relative weight given to equality and difference in feminist discourse, which was to shape the policies of the women's movement in the interwar years, was precipitated by the First World War. Under the impact of the horrors of the war, British society craved for order, peace and well-regulated societal relations.
